If there’s one thing I’ve enjoyed during my past 20 months with the Headstone Healing Project, it’s been researching the people at rest in the vandalised graves of the Drayton & Toowoomba Cemetery.
Who were they? How did they die? What is their story?
Many of the headstones damaged by two teen vandals in August 2024 were more than a century old. The lives of those buried there hold a mirror to our own, reminding us of how far we’ve come — though that isn’t necessarily a good thing. These days, we outsource our dead. We hand over our loved ones to strangers and pay a funeral director to do what family and community once did for themselves.
Take Jane McKinley Sloman, who died at her home on Klein St, Toowoomba in 1920. In her late 80s, and after a long illness, Jane was nursed at home until the end. She died on a Friday and was buried at the Drayton & Toowoomba Cemetery the next day. Back then, it was common practice: dead one day, buried the next.
The migrant couple had seven children. Five died before the age of two.
Jane’s body would have been washed, dressed, and prepared for viewing by family members or women from the neighbourhood. In those days, people knew how to comfort the dying and care for the dead. What was once common knowledge has now been lost.
An undertaker would have provided Jane’s coffin, which was laid out in the front room or parlour. The curtains were likely drawn to shield mourners from the outside world, and clocks stopped at the time of death — a symbolic gesture to show that earthly time had ended and eternity had begun.
The funeral notice in the Darling Downs Gazette on Saturday, 4 December 1920 invited mourners to “attend her Funeral, which will leave her late residence at Klein St at 3 pm this day”.
This meant that before 3 pm, family traditions would dictate a brief prayer service, a final viewing, or a quiet period of paying respects inside the home. (And that is exactly where the term “funeral parlour” comes from.)
At three o’clock, Jane’s coffin would have been carried out of the house and placed into a horse-drawn hearse. Mourners would then form a funeral procession — mostly horse and carts, with perhaps a motorised car or two — heading toward the cemetery for the primary graveside service and final committal.
After standing for 104 years, Jane’s headstone was pushed over during the vandalism spree of August 2024. Thanks to generous community donations, the Headstone Healing Project and the craftsmanship of JH Wagner & Sons, it stands upright once again. In doing so, it offers us a lesson in how times have changed.
As well as being a columnist and author of The Bottom Drawer: the after death action plan, I operate Cemetery Tours Toowoomba and am a member of the Headstone Healing Project, a community group working to repair more than 100 headstones vandalised by two teens on August 9, 2024.
